Quotes by British Authors - Page 279

Yet surely that story she had imagined was a real thing? If you created a story with your mind surely it was just as much there as a piece of needlework that you created with your fingers? You could not see it with your bodily eyes, that was all....the invisible world must be saturated with the stories that men tell both in their minds and by their lives. They must be everywhere, these stories, twisting together, penetrating existence like air breathed into the lungs, and how terrible, how awful, thought Henrietta, if the air breathed should be foul. How dare men live, how dare they think or imagine, when every action and every thought is a tiny thread to ar or enrich that tremendous tapestried story that man weaves on the loom that God has set up, a loom that stretches from heaven above to hell below, and from side to side of the universe...
Elizabeth Goudge
Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones.
Keith Richards
Give me the avowed the erect and manly foe Bold I can meet perhaps may turn the blow But of all plagues good Heaven thy wrath can send Save oh save me from the candid friend!
George Canning
The enchanted day is only enchanted if we ourselves believe that anything is possible.
Mark Donnelly
I'm happy here, and why change when you love the club and the club's in a really good position right now.
Frank Lampard
Where there is laughter there is always more health than sickness.
Phyllis Bottome
Love rules the court, the camp, the grove, and men below, and the saints above, for love is heaven, and heaven is love.
Walter Scott
A spirit of satirical frivolity so dominated Britain in the 1960s that one critic feared the country "would sink giggling into the sea.
John O'Sullivan
At this the Wart's eyes grew rounder and rounder, until they were about as big as the owl's who was sitting on his shoulder, and his face got redder and redder, and a breath seemed to gather itself beneath his heart.
T.H. White
My dear my better half.
Philip Sidney
Tomorrow is a satire on today And shows its weakness.
Edward Young
About time,” Brianna said.“Hey, sorry, we were kind of busy,” Quinn snapped. “And I didn’t exactly realize I was on a schedule.”“I don’t like what I have to do here,” Brianna said. She handed Quinn the note.He read it. Read it again.“Is this some kind of joke?” he demanded.“Albert’s dead,” Brianna said. “Murdered.”“What?”“He’s dead. Sam and Dekka are off in the wilderness somewhere. Edilio’s got the flu, he might die, a lot of kids have. A lot. And there are these, these monsters, these kind of bugs . . . no one knows what to call them . . . heading toward town.” Her face contorted in a mix of rage and sorrow and fear. She blurted, “And I can’t stop them!”Quinn stared at her. Then back at the note.He felt his contented little universe tilt and go sliding away.There were just two words on the paper: “Get Caine.
Michael Grant
Don’t misunderstand me. The terrorist actions of Al-Qaeda were and are unmitigatedly evil. But the astonishing naivety which decreed that America as a whole was a pure, innocent victim, so that the world could be neatly divided up into evil people (particularly Arabs) and good people (particularly Americans and Israelis), and that the latter had a responsibility now to punish the former, is a large-scale example of what I’m talking about - just as it is immature and naive to suggest the mirror image of this view, namely that the western world is guilty in all respects and that all protestors and terrorists are therefore completely justified in what they do. In the same way, to suggest that all who possess guns should be locked up, or (the American mirror-image of this view) that everyone should carry guns so that good people can shoot bad ones before they can get up to their tricks, is simply a failure to think into the depths of what’s going on.
N.T. Wright
The historian's rightful task is to distil experience as a medicinal warning for the future generations, not to distil a drug.
B.H. Liddell Hart
By contrast, my wife at fifty-two yeas old seems to me just as attractive as the day I first met her. If I were to say this out loud, she would say, 'Douglas, that's just a line. No one prefers wrinkles, no one prefers grey.' To which I'd reply, 'But none of this is a surprise. I've been expecting to watch you grow older ever since we met. Why should it trouble me? It's the face itself that I love, not that face at twenty-eight or thirty-four or fourty-three. It's that face.'Perhaps she would have liked to hear this but I had never got around to saying it out loud. I had always presumed there would be time and now, sitting on the edge of the bed at four a.m., no longer listening out for burglars, it seemed that it might be too late.
David Nicholls
[He]said something that made it impossible to continue working for him.[The exact words were]You're fired.
Christopher Hitchens
That's the worst of sorrow . . . it's always a vicious circle. It makes one tense and hard and disagreeable, and this means that one repels and antagonises people, and then they dislike and avoid one--and that means more isolation and still more sorrow.
Vera Brittain
To a naturalist nothing is indifferent; the humble moss that creeps upon the stone is equally interesting as the lofty pine which so beautifully adorns the valley or the mountain: but to a naturalist who is reading in the face of the rocks the annals of a former world, the mossy covering which obstructs his view, and renders indistinguishable the different species of stone, is no less than a serious subject of regret.
James Hutton
Education isn't for getting a job. It's about developing yourself as a human being.
Liz Berry
In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, "Please will you do my job for me.", 26 June 1956]
C.S. Lewis
Tolerance is the only real test of civilization.
Arthur Helps
The human spirit is not indestructible; but a courageous few discover that, when in hell, they are granted a glimpse of heaven.
Anthony Storr
One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.
John Locke
Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.
Walter Savage Landor
I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer
Douglas Adams
There was no point in telling somebody not to cry, she had always thought; indeed there were times when you should do exactly the opposite, when you should urge people to cry, to start the healing that sometimes only tears can bring. But if there was a place for tears of relief, there might even be a place for tears of pride[.]
Alexander McCall Smith
The best of us must sometimes eat our words.
J.K. Rowling
God’s Word is the living seed that brings new birth. It is the milk that nurtures the new life of a young Christian and the meat that builds the muscle of a mature believer.
Colin S. Smith
He looked the Prince up and down, like a hangman taking his measurements. 'Of course there will be a revolution,' he said. 'You are making a nation of Cromwells. But we can go beyond Cromwell, I hope. In fifteen years you tyrants and parasites will be gone. We shall have set up a republic, on the purest Roman model.
Hilary Mantel
One of the fears of having too much work is not having time to observe. And once you get recognised, there is nowhere for you to look any more. You can't sit on a night bus and watch it all happen.
Benedict Cumberbatch
The woman at the desk was a university graduate, young, colourless, spectacled, and intensely disagreeable. She had a fixed suspicion that no one — at least, no male person — ever consulted works of reference except in search of pornography. As soon as you approached she pierced you through and through with a flash of her pince-nez and let you know that your dirty secret was no secret from HER. After all, all works of reference are pornographical, except perhaps Whitaker’s Almanack. You can put even the Oxford Dictionary to evil purposes by looking up words like —— and ——.
George Orwell
It is not summer, England doesn't have summer, it has continuous autumn with a fortnight's variation here and there.
Natasha Pulley
For me happiness came from prayer to a kindly God faith in a kindly God love for my fellow man and doing the very best I could every day of my life. I had looked for happiness in fast living but it was not there. I tried to find it in money but it was not there either. But when I placed myself in tune with what I believe to be fundamental truths of life when I began to develop my limited ability to rid my mind of all kinds of tangled thoughts and fill it with zeal and courage and love when I gave myself a chance by treating myself decently and sensibly I began to feel the stimulating warm glow of happiness.
Edward Young
By gaming we lose both our time and treasure:two things most precious to the life of man.
Owen Feltham
Being a blesséd writer is a cursed attribute, when you wish to no longer be encompassed by someone and yet you are surrounded by loose leaf papers filled with the sound of his voice.
Elizabeth Brooks
...it is crucial to realize that an once of student affairs administration prevention can stave off a pound of lawyers.
Peter F. Lake
Well, that's just what I'm talking about. All Maslow would need to do is rub against your legs and start purring, and you'd immediately forget all this Hitler/Card nonsense. No one does PR like a cat. Why do you think I'm so desperate to hire him?
Manny Rayner
The moment you will be most stiff is when you die - you never get stiffer than that. So you've got to sleep well, eat well and keep moving.
Richard Lloyd Parry
Looking at your day from a “golden day” perspective helps you prioritize.
Elizabeth George
I had to nurture those doubts as if they were tiny, sickly kittens, until eventually they became sturdy, healthy grievances, with their own cat doors, which allowed them to wander in and out of our conversation at will.
Nick Hornby
Richard, marked for misery and defeat, acknowledged that power which sentiment possesses to exalt us—to convince us that our minds, endowed with a soaring, restless aspiration, can find no repose on earth except in love.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
She has her own brand of strength,brought to the surface by the dim glow of the streetlight and the whisper of night air on her skin.
Holly Bourne
We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in. We are able to see this when we travel to another country, and are able to catch a glimpse of our own country with foreign eyes.. the best we can hope for is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes.
Doris Lessing
When you've only got two choices, and you don't like either of them, make a third choice.
Andy Lane
Rural and traditional escapism. That’s my angle. Places and events where we are free to relax and be ourselves, where nobody tells us to hurry along or conform or grow up. Somewhere we can properly live.
Fennel Hudson
In the Salem of our peaceful hearts, the name of Jesus is great beyond compare: He has won our love, and He shall wear it.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
[Books are] vital to learning. Half the population don't go to football matches but that doesn't make football any less important.
John Sutherland
In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold;Alike fantastic, if too new, or old:Be not the first by whom the new are tried,Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.
Alexander Pope
It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter—set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call ‘the proles’.
George Orwell
She was going to go to her room,munch on chocolate,then collapse into bed.And if her upstairs neighbors decided to talk about who the daddy was or cry again about how much David was loved,she'd go up there and give them somthing to really bloody cry about.
Suzanne Wright
How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
E.M. Forster
All remember about my mother," Nibs told them, "is that she often said to my father, 'Oh, how I wish I had a cheque-book of my own!' I don't know what a cheque-book is, but I should just love to give my mother one.
J.M. Barrie
The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.
Joseph Conrad
I pretend not to be a champion of that same naked virtue called truth, to the very outrance. I can consent that her charms be hidden with a veil, were it but for decency's sake.
Walter Scott
But the Holy Spirit is not in a hurry. Character is the produce of a lifetime.
John R.W. Stott
He who sleeps on the Road will lose either his hat or his head.
Idries Shah
No man is greater than his prayer life. The pastor who is not praying is playing; the people who are not praying are straying. We have many organizers, but few agonizers; many players and payers, few pray-ers; many singers, few clingers; lots of pastors, few wrestlers; many fears, few tears; much fashion, little passion; many interferers, few intercessors; many writers, but few fighters. Failing here, we fail everywhere.
Leonard Ravenhill
Authority, reason, experience; on these three, mixed in varying proportions all our knowledge depends.
C.S. Lewis
The schools wear the blank faces of war buildings, their windows blown blind by rocks or guns or mortars. Their plaster is an acne of bullet marks. The huts and small houses crouch open and vulnerable; their doors are flimsy pieces of plyboard or sacks hanging and lank. Children and chickens and dogs scratch in the red, raw soil and stare at us as we drive through their open, eroding lives.
Alexandra Fuller
It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.
Alexander McCall Smith